I've been beefing up the interaction with the NPCs a bit more. Granted, it's nothing in terms of complete or even good-looking, but the barebones requirements are starting to fall into place. It's a bit tough when the artwork required just isn't there. It's even tougher when I don't have the time to sit down and generate decent art for all this. So far I've been playing tricks and drawing upside down sprites (and other things like this) to indicate various states of certain in game objects.

With three of the major NPCs ready with interactions working, albeit very rudimentary, I'm beginning to think I may need to cut down on the number of races in the game. I haven't committed to this yet. Of course I'd like to hit my target, but I'm beginning to wonder if it's just going to be too much work in the end. Most of the troubles stem from not having the artwork to support many of the things I want to do. For me, it's tough to keep things looking decent when there are simply so many assets still waiting to be done.

For the longest time I've been thinking about finally getting onto some boards and finding myself an artist who is willing to spend their free time working with me on this project. I'm still a bit hesitant. I don't like to pull someone unless I know for sure everything is going to work out. Nothing is more terrible than getting people on board and having to abandon ship for one reason or another.

Things have been a bit slow lately. First up: Zep's Dreamland.

A few bugs crept their way into the final release. Zep's Dreamland is now currently running at version 1.0.2 (still in review), which fixes a total of three bugs that were found in the wild. Hopefully there aren't too many more. Up to this point, the problems have been relatively minor, save one. If anything, they are more nuisance bugs than anything else. Most of the time they are actually beneficial to the player... except for one nasty bug which rendered a level unbeatable. Other than that, things are looking great on the Zep's Dreamland front.

Back to the main game in development, though. While I haven't done anything major, I did recently add in a bit of the basic AI for one of the NPC races in the game. The interactions that happen between this race class and the player are incredibly basic, but it's still nice to see things fitting together. I hope to add a bit more of this for all of the races so I can get a bare-bones "ecosystem" working. I'd like to bring the game to the next level. Thusfar, anything playable has consisted solely of platforming and powerup acquisition puzzles. It'll be great when I can finally push things a step further and add some character interaction.

I whipped together a quick little demo to test out a bunch of different things. It's no surprise the game crashes sometimes, here and there. Hopefully with others testing it out, I can get some better ideas as to why. On top of that, I'm concerned with how the game controls, so, hopefully I'll get some good insight there, too.

Finally putting the editor through its paces was fun. The number one complaint I have is not having a dialog for overwriting an already existing file. I also don't have the ability to quick save a file once it's opened. That is, you have to manually select it every single time from the file browser during a save. That's a pain! Through the process of putting together a mini little world with obstacles I did solve a bunch of bugs I wouldn't have otherwise realized existed. The engine is getting better day by day.

In other news, Zep's Dreamland goes on sale for the iPhone tomorrow. If you liked the classic, challenge yourself on the go with over 50 new iPhone-exclusive levels. Yeah!